Author丨Nei SanjunEditor丨TangerineRecently, there has been a large area of continuous freezing rain in many regions of China, which has a great impact on transportation, power facilities, and public travel. However, in the freezing rain, the plum blossoms are also covered with a thin layer of ice or formed into ice skates, forming a different scenery - "ice plum blossoms".
Many netizens said that although the freezing rain has brought inconvenience to life to a certain extent, Lamei has reached the peak of her "appearance", which is also due to the emergence of this weather condition.
For FMCG people, in the cold wind of phased consumption, they have finally waited for their own "ice plum blossom". At the beginning of 2024, with the concentrated outbreak of consumers' Spring Festival consumption, the gift box category and even the upstream and downstream 4 industries are busy again.
One of the representative categories, the nut gift box that used to be low-key development, is no longer low-key.
The warming gift box market.
After experiencing the "bleak" Mid-Autumn Festival and Dragon Boat Festival in 2023, "food people" finally waited for the opportunity of "gift box consumption explosion" in early 2024.
According to a senior industry insider, "from the perspective of the head enterprises, the companies that make gift boxes are seriously preparing for the "New Year", and the momentum is greater than in previous years. Among them, some of the leading enterprises carried out a large-scale dealer summary conference, and the conference stimulated dealers in the next year, but all the footholds for the future are still on the Spring Festival (CNY) gift box. ”
The reason for this is that some industry insiders believe that with the opening of the epidemic, during the Spring Festival in 2023, many people have chosen to return to their hometowns for the New Year or travel, especially in the low-tier market, driven by homecoming consumption, gift boxes have shown a high-speed outbreak.
Not only is the sales of meat, eggs and milk rising as the traditional "hard currency", but also the nut gift box, which is synonymous with high-quality health food, has also been favored by the market.
Judging from the recent news circulating in the industry, during the 2024 Goods Festival, the sales of the three squirrels' gift box gift package products** exceeded expectations. At the same time, as the benchmark of the three squirrels for many years, BESTORE's gift box products have also been partially out of stock recently.
It is worth noting that although Qiaqia is not a company that "runs with traffic", in a larger and wider distribution channel, Qiaqia's dealers are still one of the groups that can "make money steadily". Many markets, especially the sinking market, have been snapped up with Qiaqia nut gift boxes, and wholesalers are looking for distribution.
A person in charge of a large supermarket said, "The sales of nut gift boxes this year have nearly doubled compared with usual, especially some nut gift boxes with high brand awareness are more popular." It is expected that the sales of snack nut gift boxes will continue to grow. ”
Industry insiders believe that behind the increasing popularity of nut gift boxes, it highlights that nuts, as a relatively high-end health category, continue to show the characteristics of breaking through the consumption cycle.
On the one hand, as a nutritious food, nuts have many health benefits. Among them, it is rich in healthy unsaturated fatty acids, which help maintain heart health; Rich in fiber, it helps digestion and prevents constipation. In addition, nuts contain many important vitamins and minerals, such as vitamin E, magnesium, and zinc, which help boost immunity and maintain the normal functioning of the body.
This unique health benefit point is being recognized by more and more consumers in the past epidemic.
On the other hand, New Year's gifts and gift exchanges have a very important position and significance in traditional Chinese culture. From this perspective, we can see that consumers are increasingly valuing the "cultural" nature of Chinese New Year gifts and the Chinese aesthetic elements that naturally have emotional links in them—there is perhaps no more Chinese New Year gift than nuts at this time.
According to the analysis of the "New Year's Goods China Series Report - New Year's Goods Purchase Data Guide Report in 300,000 Essence Posts" released by Jingdong Supermarket, in terms of the characteristics of New Year's goods selected by users, delicious and healthy have become the focus of attention, accounting for 82%. In the category of New Year's goods, nuts have the highest demand, reaching 25%. It can be predicted that the most popular New Year's gift for this Spring Festival can only be the nut ceremony.
In the 2024 Spring Festival stalls, which have a stronger flavor of the year, the attribute of "sharing with relatives and friends" of the nut gift box is further highlighted.
The subdivision competition has begun.
Compared with e-commerce festivals such as Double 11, the Spring Festival is the embodiment of the real purchasing power released by consumers. In the eyes of many practitioners, although the consumer industry has encountered many challenges in 2023, anxiety has spread; But at the beginning of 2024, a good "nut gift box" is off to a good start, laying a good foundation for the performance growth of the whole year.
However, with the emergence of industry opportunities, competition naturally came as scheduled.
In fact, every year before the Spring Festival, the "gift-giving battle" and "grabbing the head" between leisure food companies are the highlights. At present, with the fluctuation of consumption power and the change of leisure food retail format, the concept of consumption has also been constantly changing; Focusing on such changes, it is a new challenge for enterprises to carry out more targeted marketing operations and better stimulate offline distribution and consumption.
Nei Sanjun noticed that recently, a series of advertisements for Qiaqia nuts have appeared in various media, such as focus, high-speed rail, large screens in business districts, subways and buses. With the theme of "Qia Nut Gift, New Year's Health Gift", the New Year's Festival KV, Nut New Year's Festival TVC, 3D rendering and other content have been widely disseminated.
Many consumers left messages on social ** saying that the overwhelming media placement of Qiaqia not only continues to strengthen the functional attributes of Qiaqia nuts such as "brain supplementation" and "deliciousness", but also gives consumers more "heart-to-heart" emotional communication. On the eve of this Spring Festival, everyone is more willing to buy a Qiaqia nut gift box as a gift for visiting relatives and friends.
In addition, this year, on the Douyin platform, through the joint professional nutritionist, the output of "New Year's Health" and other content, Qiaqia and the concept of health are bound and implanted in the minds of users.
Looking at the recent marketing actions, it is not difficult to find that slightly different from the "decentralized marketing" strategy in the past few years, Qiaqia has focused more on media delivery. At a time when consumption is returning to rationality and industry differentiation competition is fierce, such marketing measures have special significance with consumers and channels.
On the one hand, it provides consumers with more accurate emotional value.
The industrial threshold of nuts is high, but the consumption threshold is not high. The key to marketing competition is to see who can provide consumers with a higher dimension of emotional value and find the emotional resonance point of deep linking. From this point of view, Qiaqia has its own "ingenuity" in the placement of the above-mentioned media. For example, unlike some Douyin brand accounts that only publish TVC advertisements, Qiaqia fully respects the Douyin ecosystem, and is especially good at taking advantage of hot spots, playing with users, attracting consumers through high-quality content, and ultimately retaining consumers with high-quality products.
On the other hand, it has effectively boosted channel confidence.
Since the beginning of this year, the nut category has fallen into low-price competition, and the expansion of snack stores has exacerbated the anxiety of this industry. With the sharp price reduction of BESTORE, three squirrels entered the snack mass sales channel, and for a while, the argument of "the brand is going to die" spread. But in fact, the brand business and the retail business are fundamentally different - the core asset of the former is still the brand and the consumer stickiness behind it, while the latter's consumer stickiness is difficult to maintain.
Although the popularity of snack mass stores once blurred the boundary between the two business models, the more it is at this time, the more enterprises need to hold their positions, through a system of high-potential advertising, on the one hand, continue to consolidate their brand moat and consumer stickiness, and at the same time give the channel greater confidence, maintain the best system of high-quality products - this is the foundation of long-term development.
Occupying the "commanding heights of the mainstream" is still one of the most important marketing initiatives until now.
Chaos is frequent, and snack food needs to be "set right".
In the past two years, the format of the snack food industry has undergone tremendous changes. The competition in snack stores has intensified, and the leading brands of snack food have been forced to reduce prices, and many small brands have even disappeared from the public eye. Behind this is a partial change in the business model, a reshuffle of channel resources, and a struggle for the right to speak in the industry.
During this period, various companies are also constantly adjusting and breaking through the temporary industry dilemma in their own ways.
For example, snacks are very busy, and through the merger, they further strengthen their scale advantages and gradually "run out"; BESTORE has achieved cost reduction by further optimizing the first-class chain, and has achieved a comprehensive price reduction ...... for mainstream products under the premise of controlling the decline in profit margin to the greatest extentIn this context, Qiaqia has chosen a solid path, in addition to doing solid delivery, but also doing solid industrial chain and channel construction.
The latest news about this is that today's Qiaqia has established a complete and stable nut industry chain, and through the construction of the whole industry chain quality management system, it has improved the management process system from raw material procurement, production and processing to product circulation, so that product quality can be truly guaranteed.
It is understood that Qiaqia is the only nut brand in the industry that has realized independent intelligent manufacturing of the whole industry chain, realizing the layout from seeds to raw materials, from factories to top equipment and processes. The sales volume of Qiaqia Daily Nuts has ranked first in the country for three consecutive years, and has sold more than 1 billion packs so far, which is the best proof of the strength of its industrial chain.
It is worth noting that in addition to steadily investing in the industrial chain, Qiaqia also insists on doing nut nutrition category education and cultivating the habit of Chinese people to eat nuts every day - this is also a must-do job for a leading enterprise.
For example, in recent years, Qiaqia has been positioning the small yellow bag of daily nuts as a "daily nutritional necessity", continuing to publicize the nutritional knowledge of nuts to consumers, and disseminating the nutritional value of nuts to the public. Not long ago, the "Chinese Residents' Nutrition and Health and Nut Intake" supported by Qiaqia Public Welfare was officially released, which gave the consumption and promotion of nuts a more authoritative professional endorsement.
It is not difficult to see that from the full-link layout of production and manufacturing to the long-term construction of category mentality, Qiaqia has always had the obsession and persistence of leading enterprises. It is precisely this "cause" that grows the hot-selling "fruit" of the Qiaqia nut gift box.
The freezing rain is silent, and the plum blossoms are washed on the dust. As the nut and even snack food industry enters the second half of the reshuffle period, the competition in the industry will also return to the right track, and companies will eventually have to break through the industry development cycle with their own core values. In the final analysis, nuts and even snack foods are still an industry that competes for basic skills; As a leading enterprise, we should not chase "wealth and wealth", but keep our "duty", so as to promote the long-term healthy development of the industry.